A State of Emergency V0l: 2, Southern Rap = WTF?!?!

Ok, so it seems that at one point in time, rappers from ATL, Bama, Florida, Louisiana, DOMINATED the charts. I remember watching 106 & Park one year, and naming nothing but southern rappers on the count down. This would be around the early 2000s, up until like, 2006 when it all came to a screeching halt. What happened to southern rap? It’s like the content & the meaning went down the drain, way down the drain. Now, no offense to Soulja Boy Tellum, & DJ UNK, but the snap movement just took over, and the quality of the music got worse & worse. Now we have rappers that have some catchy beat & hook and next thing you know, the song is a hit. The art is GONE in southern rap. Oh yeah, and don’t let the song have some dance moves attached, it’s a WRAP ! Don’t even get me started on the lyrics. One thing about poetry in any form, is that it does NOT have to rhyme all the time. So if all of your songs sound like songs off Sesame Street, it’s a problem. Rappers have gotten into the habit of “dumming down,” their lyrics in order to please the crowd. So here we are with the age old question: Blame the rapper, or blame the audience? Is the rapper or the audience getting dummer? With the drop out rates in school, & the lack of general knowledge in our African-American community, it would seem like the audience is getting dummer. So these rappers are forced to dumb-down the lyrics to generate a fan base & create revenue. Then we have rappers that name themselves off of clothing companies, or types of juice, or names that rhyme & sound like a character off of, ONCE AGAIN, Sesame Street, (think hard, you’ll figure out who I’m talking about.) And when are these rappers going to give up the, “I was a drug-dealer turned rapper,” story? I mean, give it up already.

There needs to be a revival in southern rap. I mean seriously. And the only thing that is going to change it, its rappers who believe in REAL meaning, instead of what is catchy ALL THE TIME. True, a catchy song is needed to catch some BUZZ, maybe one or two songs, but artists need to stop being afraid of having songs that challenge the mind. Just because it might not get enough spins on the radio, doesn’t mean you can’t earn a fan base. Stimulate my mind, make me think, use metaphors & imagery. We’re tired of the same stuff-